Gasping for air
by The Horseman
Summary: Call reflects on how it all went wrong...


AUTHOR'S NOTE: This is set around a century after 'Alien: Resurrection'.  
  
Feedback would be nice, so I can correct any errors (I have never seen any of the  
  
Films), and because this is my first fanfic. All original characters and plotline  
  
are mine by 'cause I thought of 'em and to be fair, the rest belongs to 20th Century  
  
Fox. I humbly beg them not to sue me into yesteryear, as I have no money anyway.  
  
Four_horsemen_of_the_apocalypse@hotmail.com in the unlikely event of anyone  
  
wanting to archive this  
  
ALL HAIL TO  
  
Pink Rabbit Productions, whose 'Alien: Odyssey' provided me with all my  
  
nowledge about the Alien stories  
  
1.1 'Gasping for Air'  
  
by The Fifth Horseman  
  
'And so I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds'  
  
Ancient Hindu Text  
  
The creature knew that the prey was in the building somewhere, it was just a matter of finding it. Already, it could smell the fear emanating from the younger prey. The older prey knew it, and knew that it could track their fear, feeding on the terror in their hearts. They had schooled themselves to calm, forced their emotions deep within them. But the younger ones of the prey hadn't had the time or the experience to save themselves. If it had known what irony was, or cared for that matter, the creature would have appreciated it. The prey was leading it to them by a simple biological action which they couldn't control.  
  
Irony was irrelevant. The hunt was relevant. Only the hunt was relevant.  
  
The prey was down to the last of their ammunition. One of the prey, a strong specimen had attempted to fight the creature without ammunition, using its useless and pointless limbs to attempt to kill it. The attack had lasted barely four minutes.  
  
It appreciated bravery in its prey. The specimen would make a good host for the hive. The Queen had commanded it, and so it shall be.  
  
There were many hosts now. The important hosts, the senior prey had long ago been captured. Only one of the important prey had been outside their grasp.  
  
It had puzzled over this prey, unsure about how to catch it. It did not emit the usual scent that the other prey gave out. It had gave out a strange mixture of scents, unwavering in its strangeness. But that was while the prey was in the complex. It had gone, and the remainder of the prey were desperate. It could already sense even the most hardened prey becoming afraid.  
  
Fear was good.  
  
"""""""""""""""""""  
  
"COMPANY A! RETREAT TO TERITAIRY POSITIONS!! COMPANY B, PROVIDE COVERING FIRE! SAVE YOUR AMMO! MOVE!!!"  
  
Kate Crywowski was afraid. Not of the creatures, for she had met too many of them to be afraid of them. They were like old friends, their breathtaking ugliness a familiar visage. She would miss them when she was gone.  
  
Kathryn Abigail Crywowski was afraid of one thing. That one thing was of becoming a host. The thought of having her body overwhelmed by a facehugger, having her own treacherous body aiding and abetting the enemy was too much to bear. She had seen and killed enough of the children to know what happened to hosts. If anyone had been interested enough to ask what her greatest fear was, she would have told them to shut the goddamn hell up. She wouldn't have told them about the facehuggers. Barely half of them knew anyway. It had been a quarter, but the old-timers lived longest in these situations.  
  
She fired a few times at the creatures in front of her, hitting one in what she supposed was the face twice. It was a mutant, one of the newer breeds, ugly to even its mother, who wasn't a sight herself. It fell, screaming an unholy symphony of pain and suffering. Fuck, this wasn't why she'd joined the marines. I'm a motherfucking shuttle mechanic, goddamit to hell!  
  
She rested by one of the few bits of wall that was still upright. Sparks flew everywhere, providing the only illumination that the Marines had. Blood ran down her face from a cut on her forehead. She tried to ignore the acidic wound on her right leg, and concentrated on getting her men out.  
  
It still seemed strange she thought, her men. Fifty minutes ago, they had been Captain Arnolds' men. Two hours ago, Major Reilly's. A day ago, Colonel Waterhouse's. But two days ago, the creature had landed. Now, she was the most senior officer left.  
  
Lieutenant First Class Kathryn Abigail Crywowski, USM Marine Corps. Senior Shuttle Engineer, Marine Corps 42nd Infantry Regiment. Planet C2G- 100923487-S.  
  
She recited it as a mantra to herself, keeping her sane.  
  
She turned to hear a scream, human this time. She watched as Bob fell, gun clutched to his hand, facehugger doing its duty. He tore it off his face, but not before it implanted the seed into him. The seed of a new creature. He looks at her, eyes pleading for survival. And she looks back, impassive. They have know way of knowing how long the host will take to mature. They used to take hours. But that was goddamn evolution for you. They were simply better at it. The newer breeds, even though they were disabled in the eyes of their kin, took barely twenty minutes to evolve. She stares back, barks an order to her men, and makes the chopping motion. He can't live. It's too risky.  
  
Sergeant Second Class Bob Newman lifts his gun to his chest, and shoots himself in the stomach. All in the name of duty.  
  
She listened as the alien that she thought was missing, but had not known so, came around behind them. She saw its features emerge.  
  
"FUCKING MURDERING SCUM!!" She screamed as she emptied the gun into the creature. "THAT'S FOR BOB!" finger squeezes the trigger in retribution for her doomed lover. "THAT'S FOR THE CAPTAIN!" another squeeze. "THAT'S FOR COLONEL WATERHOUSE!" yet another squeeze. She approached the fallen creature, dodging fallen girders and masonry. She knew that there was one more bullet left. "AND THAT YOU SHIT" squeeze, "THAT'S FOR FUCKING ME!". It screamed in pain, as Kate expertly kills it. She knows how, after all, she's had the experience.  
  
She never sees the facehugger coming. It is sitting on her face, implanting her before she even knew that her worst nightmare had come true. She turns to the men, broken. "GREENHART!"  
  
The Australian turns, keeping one eye on the battle that they are losing. "SIR!"  
  
"YOU HAVE COMMAND!" She yells. The only way to get herself heard. He knows what the ramifications of it are. She gives her final order to the Sergeant. "ABANDON THE BASE NOW!"  
  
She turns, and takes her last clip out. The one with the single, end- it-all bullet. The one she swore that she'd never use. And she inserts it into her gun.  
  
She sees that the Alien she had shot is still alive, but dying. She lays down near it. Somehow, it is fitting that they both die together. She lifts the barrel to her stomach, and tears away her clothing. Somewhere in the distance there is the noise of the battle, and of Marines dying. She points the barrel to her chest, and prays to a God that she stopped believing in to let her men live. Her last thoughts, strangely enough, are not on her men; her dead lover, Bob Newman; or her life.  
  
I should have listened to the motherfucking auton. I should have listened to the motherfucking auton. I should have listened to the motherfucking auton.  
  
Fear is good.  
  
"""""""""""""""""""""  
  
I am not afraid. I lie hear, on the crumpled covers of my bed, while the autopilot takes us through their territory. There are no other ships, for what need have they of ships? Each queen is the enemy of the other, and so they colonise one planet alone, a queen taking over a world until there are no humans left free. The only humans left alive are the hosts. We didn't think that they knew how, but they do.  
  
They adapted our own machinery to use it against us. Our surgical machines keep us alive as hosts. I have to give it to them, they have perfected the ultimate hell. People are kept alive as constant hosts. Prometheus if you like, but they peck out, not in.  
  
I am not afraid because I cannot be afraid. I wiped it from my programming.  
  
This is the problem, you know? Every time I close my eyes, my thoughts come back fifty years to this. Even half a century later, I cannot forget the wonderful woman who gave her life for me.  
  
Lieutenant First Class Ellen Ripley.  
  
I repeat it, savouring every word, running my lips over the necessary syllables to make the word. Let's try it again, shall we? Lieutenant First Class Ellen Ripley. Even wiping every memory, every fragment of data I had in my CPU about her can't stop it. Lieutenant First Class was a poor rank, above few and below many.  
  
I used to feel so proud listening to it.  
  
Lieutenant First Class Ellen Ripley.  
  
I loved her. I loved her strength, her willpower, and yet I loved the way that she was kind with me. The way that she could kill them without a second thought – but when we were alone, she would be so kind and loving it would make the angels cry.  
  
And I lost her. I killed her.  
  
My CPU brings up the details I thought that I had buried. Planet C7G- 110932. Fifty years, eight months, two weeks, six days, eleven hours, nine minutes and twenty-four seconds ago from mark.  
  
Mark.  
  
I didn't even manage to get to kill the original. No, the original had to jump into a lava pit to kill a queen. I got to kill the seventh clone in a batch. The one who had had the extra, impossible chance. She had put the gun to her head, fired and found that God had removed the bullet at the very last minute. And then I put it back again a few moments later.  
  
Irony, huh? The last survivor from the first human-Alien conflicts is a one- hundred and twenty year old droid with a nervous twitch down her face (right hand side); no hand past the wrist on her left hand side; one and a quarter eyeballs and a malfunctioning CPU due to being consentingly mindraped by a useless first gen surgeon who couldn't see out of either eye.  
  
I'm not even the droid she fell in love with.  
  
Life's a bitch when you think about it.  
  
To flesh out the details somewhat, I went into depression after she died. Suicidal depression. First of all, I spent five years finding a droid who would kill me, and then I paid it to enter my mind, and forcefully strip everything there. Kill me in short.  
  
All so I could be with Ripley.  
  
There wasn't any alternative. I could not cope with Ripley being dead, and me being alive. Period. So I decided to end it all. Switch it all off. Fuck mankind, it could cope by itself. I wanted Ripley.  
  
And I failed. The failsafes, the bloody failsafes stopped me. The eighty- two lines of code written into me that prevent Unit #00193-A from destroying itself in any way whatsoever. Just so that I could be taken back into slavery. The Aliens have given us the perfect hell, but USM came close.  
  
So I did the nearest thing. I went to the FirstGen, and asked it to wipe any reference to Ripley from my mind. I was suicidal. There simply wasn't an alternative.  
  
And the fucking son-of-a-bitch screwed it up. Ripley, I said. Just Ripley. Nothing else. I can't know about Ripley.  
  
And what does it do? It rewrites my personality files. To give the shit credit, it did wipe Ripley from my brain. But I forgot about the security cameras in the ship. That's irony. In my own efforts to kill myself, I kept the one thing that would keep me alive.  
  
Perfect copies of everything that we did for the last years. And in my curiosity, I opened the files which I knew nothing about, and made the mindrape useless.  
  
Goddamn it to hell.  
  
""""""""""""""  
  
We lost.  
  
That's the point of it all.  
  
We lost the damn war with the creatures.  
  
Officially, USM and its allies are holding steady with them. For every planet that is taken, a cultist planet is reclaimed.  
  
Unofficially? We're getting our arses kicked straight into the fires of Hell. The Cult is claiming more planets every day. We're fighting with 29- year old Colonels, and 15 year old Lieutenants. Unofficially, 5% of the human population are now above the age of 56. Unofficially, 0.000001% are involved in an activity that is not fighting the creatures.  
  
Excluding the Cult of course.  
  
The Federation to Worship the Second Coming of Our Lord the Saviour. The Human Race has refound Christianity, and the creatures are the Angels of Death. Send by God to wipe the unrighteous from the face of the galaxy. After the unrighteous are dead, the Lord will come down from the heavens and reclaim the human race as his own. So, logically, it is the duty of the Cult members to spread the Angels so that the Lord's work can be done. Alleluia and A-fucking-men to that.  
  
After we lost the first war, after the battle of EC-21O9, after 8 brigades of marines were wiped out by the creatures, USM fractured. We now have, to our everlasting joy, twelve different companies. USM is still the largest, but only four of the companies are its allies. The Cult came slowly about twenty years after USM evacuated from the outer colony worlds. And C7G- 110932 was one of those worlds. Where we landed to treat some of my internal injuries from a shuttle accident. Where we were met by charming people who were only to eager to help me. And seemed to be eyeing up Ripley like cannibals at an all-you-can-eat Veggie bash. And where I watched as Lieutenant First Class Ellen Ripley was, somewhat ironically considering her name, ripped to shreds by the starving creatures in an effort to protect me. Little ol' me.  
  
God, we are so screwed it isn't even funny anymore.  
  
"""""""""""""""""  
  
This is probably the longest thing which I have written in quite a while. Which is good considering what it is meant for. An attempt to explain my actions in writing. An attempt to explain where we all went so motherfucking wrong to anybody who might still be around after this visit from Satan, which we call the last two-hundred years of war, is over.  
  
Finally, a will:  
  
'I, Annalee Call, being of pretty unsound mind and body, hereby make four wishes:-  
  
In the event of this vessel being recovered within a relatively short amount of time, would whoever finds it tell the men and women of USM 42nd Marine Regiment that I am sorry. I tried to explain the dangers that they were in, but they just wouldn't listen, and I couldn't stay to fight against the creatures, it was just impossible.  
  
Also, extend my congratulations to Lieutenant Crywowski and Sergeant Newman. If they are still alive that is.  
  
  
  
In the event of this vessel being recovered, and the human race still existing, pay attention to this letter. I didn't record it for my health you know. Strangely, I still have faith in you people.  
  
  
  
If the creatures have been exterminated by the time this vessel is recovered, then I wish to be buried on planet C7G-110932. Will a grave for Ripley also be made.  
  
If you are a creature that has found this, then do what you like with me. I don't care'  
  
There, finished. I open my eyes once more, to check that everything is alright.  
  
The heading will take me about three dozen light years out of the galaxy on a wide arc, and then back in through the creatures' territory, into what is now USM-controlled. There is enough fuel to last the trip. Apart from this room, the entire ship is packed with the stuff.  
  
Everything is alright.  
  
I close my eyes, and pick up the rifle that I have lay by the side of my bed. I know where it is even in the dark, with only one and a quarter eyes. I am well prepared.  
  
I load the rifle from memory, fingers deftly inserting the ammunition into the barrel.  
  
I raise the rifle so that it rests on my skin, over my CPU. It feels cold, but like a human touch. Wait for me Ripley, I'm just coming. Won't be a second.  
  
Quick prayer to a God which seems to have forgotten us. Let them live, for they don't deserve what they have got.  
  
Take a deep breath and pull the trigger.  
  
Goodnight. 


End file.
